A New World Order: Normalizing Hate

What
do you do when you’re consumed with the knowledge that you’re right, that you
know the right way, the right thing to do, but you need to convince other
people to listen?

Most
of us would come up with a plan, construct our arguments, anticipate and
prepare against counter arguments, then plead our case.

But
what if your passion causes you to lose perspective? What if the world around
you, a world that increasingly makes ostracization and violence against others
acceptable, inspires a different way?

Last
year, staff at a hotel in Ohio heard an Emirati man speaking Arabic on his phone, and called 911 to falsely claim he was pledging allegiance to ISIS.

When
a Texas deputy was shot and killed in April, several websites falsely reported
that a trio of Muslim refugees were responsible, to stir up support for
stronger deportation and immigration policies.

In
May, authorities in Germany discovered that a soldier had registered as a Syrian
seeking asylum, with the intent of planning an attack and blaming it on
refugees.

image from Debate.org

Playing
the blame game is not new. In the U.S., white Americans have been pointing the
finger at black Americans for hundreds of years.

American minorities are now
flipping the script and blaming Trump’s right-wing and supremacist supporters.

Even Trump has weighed in, with conspiracy theories that accuse Jews of attacking
their own synagogues and Muslims of attacking their own mosques.

The growing epidemic of paranoia and deceit is mind-boggling. Examples continue to sprout, ranging from the banal to outright murder. The scary thing is that most are not simple cases of ignorance. They are calculated efforts to use fear of a “faceless” enemy as a means to an end.

But
what about the collateral damage? The reinforcement of misguided beliefs and
prejudices through everyday terror, feeding an endless cycle of destruction and
encouraging similar predatory acts of cowardice?

For
a long time after the September 11 attacks, the meme in America was “if we
do/don’t do XYZ, the terrorists will win.”

So,
what do we do when the terrorists are the people next door? The people who
won’t be found through profiling or names on lists? The people who feel a few
sacrifices might need to be made for everyone to buy into their world view? How are they any different than the people they’re trying to
combat?

We
have historical examples of purges and a holocaust which many choose to ignore
or deny. We have modern-day genocides to which we turn a blind eye. We continue
down the same path with the justification that “this time it’s different.” The
roles of persecutor and persecuted may shift, but the result is always the
same.

When
we sit in silence, shake our heads, or shrug in disbelieving defeat, we are
giving tacit assent. These horrors then become our responsibility, because we
are nurturing the belief that this vilification is justified.

Speaking
up, speaking out, admitting our fear, and showing we’re willing to take a
rational look at what seems different—that’s the only way to protect humanity from
our latest threat: the menace within.